 And our first talk today is we're going to hear about the Living Knowledge Network. The Living Knowledge Network was created by the British Library and is an exciting partnership of national and public libraries which is centred on exchanging knowledge and developing memorable experiences for public library audiences. So we're going to hear from Catherine Blameer, Blameer and Maxime Ponds Webster from the British Library who will explore how the network enables libraries to share ideas, learn new skills and discover connections between their collections. And Rianne Isaac from these library will also speak and will discuss how the support of the network has increased engagement with their special collections and created cultural opportunities for local communities. So I will hand over to Catherine, Maxime and Rianne if you could share your screen and turn your cameras on. Thank you. Hello everybody. It's brilliant to be here today to introduce you to the network. My name is Catherine Blameer. I'm a white woman. I've got extremely long brown hair. I'm looking very warm. And I'm in my 30s. Hopefully that gives you an idea of my appearance. So yeah, I'm here to introduce the network. So the Living Knowledge Network really kind of came out of the idea, the ambition of the library to make our intellectual heritage available to everyone for research, inspiration, enjoyment, wherever you live. So we are our ethos is to build on the incredible local knowledge of libraries around the country, but use our national convening power to develop a really mutually supportive and self sustaining network of libraries across the UK. And we really are coming together to reinforce the idea of libraries as a vitally important public asset for our communities. So what are we? Well, we are founded by the British Library, but also in collaboration with the National Library of Scotland and the National Library of Wales, who are founding partners. And we also have a presence in Northern Ireland with libraries and I, and we have 31 public library partners stretched all across the UK. We also have a wider ecosystem, which is really very exciting sort of reach into communities via nearly 1000 branch and community libraries. So again, the ethos is to create this really supportive community that enables the creation of fantastic experiences for the public and really coming together to see what we can do more. How we can have a greater impact and combining that national and local residents. We see our position as a national library is convening thought bringing together libraries to look at really big topics and try and add value to those discussions by just simply creating the spaces where those discussions can occur. And a place where library professionals themselves can come together to share skills with each other. For example, through the network, a librarian in Edinburgh would be able to share their challenges and shared experiences with perhaps a librarian Jersey or down in Exeter. So we've got some really sort of wide ranging partners. And again, it's all about that reciprocal partnership, drawing on the strength of a national to regional connection. So what do we do. So coming together to share knowledge and ideas is really central to this. One of the ways we've been doing that recently, particularly through the lockdown was creating these sort of digital online learning experiences. Here's just a few examples of some of the topics that we covered. There's a great one with libraries connected around death positive libraries. We sort of try to get a lot of feedback from librarians to develop the program. And we've covered a range of topics. It was fantastic in the lockdown as we were able to connect with Denmark to find out, you know, from from our house where where they were at with their opening. We could learn from them as we then moved into opening up libraries across the UK. We've built partnerships, sharing collections. This was a Shakespeare exhibition that happened a few years ago with Birmingham library. We also partner with other organizations. So through the fantastic network, other organizations see opportunities to share some of their cultural work as well. This was a fantastic collaboration with an organization called poet in the city. It was called collections inverse. And I was exploring how we can reinterpret exhibitions through the power of poetry. And then those commissioned poets from the communities then performed those poems in the libraries themselves. And we had an incredibly vibrant highlight event at the end of that collaboration at the bottom here. There was a live stream from hay festival, and it was just great to be able to bring that fantastic festival to libraries across the UK. But what's really important to understand, I think, is that a lot of our digital outreach work and digital collaboration work does kind of come from a physical element. And this is the exhibition that we have every year. We create centrally at the British Library create a set of four panels for each library in the network. And then those panels launch simultaneously across the network. So it's a massive nationwide exhibition all occurring at the same time. And all of these panels are based on the theme of a particular blockbuster exhibition at the British Library. This one was our first one, which was the history of magic covering several different topics. But what's really exciting about this project is what the libraries themselves bring to it through their own understanding of their communities, highlighting their local collections, partnering with other organizations in their communities to make this exhibition have a really fantastic local resonance. Through libraries, you know, unheard narratives can be can be brought to the fore, perhaps in ways that haven't been heard before. And Rianne will talk a lot more about this later in the presentation, but this was just a great example of our recent exhibition breaking the news where you can see this incredibly sophisticated exhibition that has been developed by Rianne at Leeds Libraries. Really fantastic local objects coming out of their collections which Rianne will go into in a lot more detail. So just to give you an idea of the general scale, the first exhibition reached more than 70 775,000 people. We developed many libraries themselves developed these partnerships within their own authorities. We had all these people watching live streamings around 3000 people in that instance. The international development was continuing and over the course of three exhibitions we've nearly reached 2 million people through libraries, which is a fantastic testament to the collaborations of the libraries involved is really through their local knowledge through their kind of expanding of the themes of the exhibition that bring that make this this reach so so significant. And what's really fantastic is what they bring to it themselves in terms of their own exhibitions at their own events. Sorry. And here's just a few examples from Twitter of some libraries that have created their own events programs. I'm going to pass over to Maxime now to continue talking about the live streaming. Hello, I'm Maxime. My full name is Maxime Ponce Webster. My pronouns are she her and my title is live screening producer at the Living Knowledge Network. I'm a woman with kind of purple coloured hair which is tied in a bun and I'm wearing a yellow and white patterned shirt. I'm also wearing a kind of Britney Spears style headset and I wear glasses. So I just wanted to start by talking about the kind of ethos of why libraries. So a study that's very familiar to librarians but not necessarily familiar to other sectors is that in December 2021 a study found that librarians are among the most trusted professionals in Britain. 23% of Britons say they trust librarians to tell the truth. That's in contrast with museum curators at 86% charity execs at 49% and journalists at 28% which is quite interesting given that our most recent exhibition is about the news. Through our cultural programming we aim to convene conversation and discussion creating a space for people to engage in topics that they may not otherwise encounter. Through the network of libraries and particularly our work directly with library staff, we can ensure that those spaces are trusted and safe for individuals to ask questions, be curious and actively listen to others. We convene the conversations and discussion through a vibrant programme of events with world recognised speakers and regional voices, our live screening programme. Our UK wide remit goes hand in hand with our objective of convening conversation. It's important to us that we connect people of differing backgrounds and experiences. Digital is an invaluable asset when forging these connections between disparate audiences. As such, all of our events are live screening events. We hold an event in a single location or have speakers join us remotely and harness live streaming capabilities to have people join the events from public libraries across the UK. If you go to the next slide, Catherine. Brilliant. Thank you. You can see how we connect prestigious speakers such as Joanna Lumley and Moira Stewart, physical events and live screening to create a unique experience for all involved. Our speakers are always extremely enthusiastic about the opportunity to connect with libraries and their users and often leave our events with a renewed passion for the importance of libraries to communities. Next slide please. People interact with their libraries in a variety of ways, whether they enter a building every day, use ebook services while on the move or find themselves dependent upon delivery and remote services. In wanting to create cultural offers that most effectively serve the needs of library users and complement the activity of libraries, we take a two pronged approach to live screenings. We support libraries to host screenings within library buildings and locations with individuals physically gathering in a space together. But additionally, we stream our events online through the lens of the local public library. It's important to us, even with the recognized brand and prestige of the British library that the online experience of our program is led by and channeled through the connection people have with their public library. Streaming online is important for reducing certain access barriers to cultural experiences, as I think we all became very aware during COVID. But it's also important for people to engage with digital digital programs that frequently engage with digital programs they enjoy doing things online, and they can realize the wealth and breadth of public libraries offers through our website. Next slide please. Here you can see how we iterated our design from our online from the library to your home offer to become more user focus considering the journey of library users across the UK from their library to an online experience. We recognize the incredible wealth of content created by libraries in a desire to send to the libraries, the communities and local narratives. We developed our online offer to platform content from our network libraries side by side with centrally produced events program which may come from partners such as the British Library, Hay Festival or the Royal Society for Literature. This way we're reducing the geographical barrier of engaging with libraries, allowing people in Exeter to enjoy stories surfaced in Edinburgh, building audiences from Surrey events hosted in Sheffield library and sharing online exhibitions in Bristol with people living in Birmingham. Next slide please. Unlocking our resources as the National Library of the UK, we amplify local narratives, bringing local community stories to the attention of people across the UK. In a time of division and isolation, there's a real power in recognizing resonances in personal stories across disparate geographical locations. As part of our exhibition breaking the news, we traveled to Jersey, Cambridge and Wakefield to record short films of library staff, telling remarkable stories that they pulled from their collections. We find enormous value in not only amplifying local narratives, but also platforming the skills knowledge and passion of library staff. Next slide please. But when it comes to content creation, nothing is quite like a live experience. In our aim to pull cultural authority out of London and into communities, we produce live screening events in and with libraries across the UK, showcasing an incredible diversity of spaces, voices and perspectives. Here you can see events we've held with our library partners in Leeds, Sheffield and Exeter. Our work isn't about broadcast, but about co-production and collaboration. As a team at the British Library, we are continually so impressed and happily challenged by the innovation of our public library partners. With this in mind, Rianne will talk to you about the impact the Living Knowledge Network and partnerships with the British Library has had in Leeds. Hello, I'm Rianne Isaac and I'm Senior Librarian for Special Collections at Leeds Libraries. I'm a woman in my mid 30s with brown hair and I wear a black and white shirt dress. That's enough for me. So Leeds has had a really close relationship with the British Library for a number of years due to the location of the British Library site in Boston Spa, which is located just outside of the city, which houses 75% of the National Library's collections. And this relationship has continued to develop since the Living Knowledge Network was established and Leeds became one of the pilot public libraries in 2016. Next slide please. And during this time, we've delivered exhibitions such as the History of Magic and Making Your Mark, which were inspired by the British Library's major London exhibitions, but also tailored to our own local audiences and displaying items from our Special Collections. It was really exciting to discover that we also held books that were on display at the British Library, like History of the Four-Footed Beasts, and were able to include these in our exhibitions. And often we could source interesting local equivalents, a highlight of securing the loan of Agatha Cook Christie's petrified handbag from Brother Shipton's Cave. These exhibitions provided communities outside of London the opportunity to engage with high quality content produced by the British Library, combined with stories from our own collections and the chance to view items of historic and cultural interest firsthand. Next slide please. We develop event programs around these exhibitions and have hugely benefited from the livestream offer of British Library events into our libraries. Our audiences are encouraged to submit their questions on Twitter, interacting with both the London event and other audiences simultaneously watching from other library locations. LKN are committed to making these events feel really inclusive. Even the simple acts of the speaker welcoming each individual library helps create a really good sense of a shared experience. It is a real treat when someone like Margaret Outwood says hello to everyone who leads or one of our questions is selected. We also display collection items alongside the screenings to create an added value blended physical and digital experience. For example, before watching Nigella Lawson's voice and cook who writing read 18th century cookbooks available for people to browse. Next slide please. And we become confident in curating the panel exhibitions work with partners such as museums and archives to secure loans and programming talks and workshops. However, just as we were preparing to open the exhibition Unfinished Business Fight for Women's Rights, the pandemic hit and we had to quickly decide how to deliver the project online and the ability to produce virtual events became more important than ever. We hosted the exhibition on our blog Secret Library Leads and created a 360 degree tour on PolyGoogle. This platform unfortunately no longer exists, but it did make us think about how to display online content in different ways. The move to an online format gave us the opportunity to be more collaborative with our programming. In partnership with the British Library, we delivered a weekend of events, which included a panel discussion with Tracy Chevalier, a spoken word showcase, and a wiki edit song that added more women from Leeds onto Wikipedia. Next slide please. The support of the British Library and LKM during Unfinished Business gives the skills and confidence to organize further high quality virtual events, especially as part of the BBC novels that shaped our world project release use gaming and mixed reality performances to engage audiences with reading and special collections. We ran a game jam, which attracted a number of creative submissions. These are a couple of my favourites. These are available to view online and we can use them for future activities. Next slide please. VR artist Rosie Summers was commissioned to create a world inspired by an early edition of Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe in a live performance using tilt brush software. This was enjoyed by both gamers as well as book enthusiasts who watched a much loved fantasy world come to life in front of their eyes. This also resulted in a bespoke piece of digital art, which was a valuable asset for the library. Next slide please. And when in-person events returned, the next natural step was to deliver a live stream from Leeds to the rest of the Living Knowledge Network. This was part of the Break in the News programme and took place in our stunning Telltale Cafe, which is the original reading room. The events celebrated the role of regional news with local journalists from different backgrounds as panellists. This powerful and topical debate was even more impactful coming from a regional library where the subject matter particularly resonated. As Maxime says, it's not simply a broadcast, but a collaboration where each partner brought different skills and resources to ensure that different voices were amplified and everyone was able to contribute. As our first major hybrid event after two years of virtual programming, this was an exciting step in welcoming visitors back into our buildings. It wasn't completely without any challenges, not least a fun affair arriving outside right before the event, but adapting to the unexpected is something we've all had to become experts in. Next slide please. Membership of the Living Knowledge Network has provided us not only with unique opportunities to deliver cultural events for our communities, but also enabled us to share expertise and ideas with colleagues. From conservation to exhibition curation and interpretation. The British Library recognized the value of public libraries and LKN gives us some of the tools and supports needed to explore that potential. Going forward, I would like these to further collaborate with LKN regional libraries, organizing regular loans and material for exhibitions, and highlight the connections between our special collections and tell the stories of our communities. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much to Rian, Catherine and Maxime there for kicking us off in such good style. We will now hear about a collaboration between research volunteers, Staffordshire Archives and Heritage and Keel University, which has led to the development of digital research resources and research tools as part of two recent projects. A case for the ordinary, the patient experience of mental health care in Staffordshire, 1880 to 1960, and small bills and petty finance co-creating the history of the old poor laws, 1750 to 1834. These projects were funded by Welcome and the Arts and Humanities Research Council respectively with the dual aims of increasing research access to collections and delivering high quality public engagement. So we will hear from Rebecca Jackson from Staffordshire Archives and Heritage and Alana Tompkins, Professor of History at Keel University, who will explore the relationship between the research volunteers, the archive and the academics and the impact of this three way collaboration on research engagement and access to collections. So over to you and thank you. Hello everybody. I'm Rebecca. I work for Staffordshire Archives and Heritage. I've got light brown shoulder length hair. I'm wearing glasses and a blue top. And I'm in my 50s, although I prefer not to think about that. I hope that's helpful. So on to our presentation today. The five services need to make their collections widely accessible and academics aim to engage the public with their research and volunteer researchers stimulate new ideas for research and engagement. Collaboration between these three groups presents opportunities to improve access to collections and research. The projects we're discussing today produce digital research tools and resources. They range from databases and blogs to a data capture app called capturing the past, which is aimed at the general researcher. We're looking less at the resources themselves today. You can do that online or ask us about afterwards. And instead we're focusing on the actual partnership that made these resources possible and better. The case for the ordinary project began with an idea to create a digital resource to improve research access to the Staffordshire Asylum's archive collection. With support from Keel and Birmingham universities, the archive service received a grant from welcome to produce a data set of historic patient information. And we had an additional budget for public engagement. Building on that grant and with the support of the archive service. Alana then obtained, that's Alana my co presenter today, obtained economic and social Research Council funding for a PhD student to work with the archives. The two grant funded projects would be mutually beneficial linking up in terms of research and digital resources. And even more importantly, they would have a greater impact in terms of public engagement because we widened the collaboration to include a group of volunteer researchers. In practice, the collaboration presented many opportunities. From an academic perspective PhD student Lucy was embedded with the archive project team working on the Staffordshire Asylum's project as we came to call it for two years and was able to help us shape the data set to meet best meet academic needs. She bought an end users perspective to the resources. In addition, Lucy also had opportunities for public engagement facilitated by the archive service, writing an exhibition text posting on the Staffordshire Asylum's blog and giving talks to public audiences, which is not always an opportunity that starting off academics would have. She also benefited from working with the research volunteers at the archives, their questions and the informal discussions that they had sparked ideas and challenged her I think she'd say to think outside her own research remit. So you can see that that collaboration, just from an academic perspective had some opportunities. From the volunteer perspective. The collaboration had other opportunities complimentary, but different. The group met with Lucy weekly. They located patient cases and discussed how these hidden voices in the asylum records might be presented from modern general origins with similar experiences and concerns around mental health. And that was particularly popular and tapped into during the pandemic as concerns around mental health came to the fore. At the same time, remote volunteers then research the patient backgrounds and case studies were published on the blog alongside thematic articles by Lucy based on her academic research. One example is the case of little Selena pictured here, which drew out themes of social deprivation, endemic disease and family relationships in the context of mental health. The volunteer group particularly welcomed the opportunity to develop knowledge through informal discussions with an expert and found the focus of Lucy's academic research really stimulating. It wasn't something that they'd had as volunteer groups before. They were also motivated by the inclusion of their research in the blog and in the exhibition. They all came to the exhibition and delved into the blog on a regular basis. The opportunities presented by the collaboration between those two groups and with us were legion so because we don't have so much time. I'm just going to mention a few of those. Firstly, we benefited greatly from our partners advice and backing for the grant applications in the first place. We couldn't have got the money for this project without that. Then at the other end of the project, the archive service achieved a much better end product through the collaboration. We had a well researched but accessible project blog that deals with difficult subjects. We have a well used online index and also a data set which is really tailored to the research needs of our target audience and an exhibition based on academic research. The data has engaged local audiences really well and is surprisingly popular with families despite the challenging subject and it's been on view throughout Staffordshire libraries for the last year or so. Apart from these resources, our volunteers are enthused and they feel a sense of satisfaction about their research work. And as a consequence of the collaboration, we now have a tested model of working which we continue to build on and perhaps as importantly, we're developing a reputation as a trusted partner for collaborative projects. And lastly, our profile within the county and within our own organization Staffordshire County Council is raised by the success of the three way partnership. I don't think we've ever had so many councillors interested in what we're doing as with this joint collaborative partnership. So following that summary of the opportunities presented by just one of our collaborative projects, it's over to Alana who's going to share with you some wider reflections and also some of the problems. Thanks Alana. Thanks Rebecca, I'm just hoping it has moved on so that's perfect. Thank you very much Rebecca and brief description of me. I'm a bespectacled brunette woman in her fifties who was introduced by her colleague once as being older than she looks you can take from that what you wish. This second half of the talk I'm going to speak about the collaboration between the structure archives and keel University from the perspective of academic priorities, volunteer goals or at least what it seems to seem to me to be volunteer goals, and also reflections about archival ambitions in a way to augment and solidify the sorts of impressions, which we hope already have been conveyed by the first half of the talk. I've got a bullet point here for something called the ref or the research excellence framework this is for anybody who's lessedly unfamiliar with this. This is a every six to eight years every research active department in an English, sorry British higher education is subjected to an assessment of its research quality. And as of 2014 a significant chunk of that the mark that we get the score that we get as a result of that external assessment is allocated as a result of impact in other words our ability to speak to people beyond other academics. This means that we are obliged to speak quite in quite a tailored way to the different sorts of categories of impact that academics might hope to have might hope to exert. Some disciplines, perhaps may hope to make a difference to policy, for example, the arts and humanities disciplines don't really necessarily have that kind of leverage, or not in lesson, except in most extreme circumstances so we tend to see ourselves tapping into impacts which we can claim around quality of life and service delivery. And those are two things which I think we were able to demonstrate very decisively in the, we've just had a ref reported on the 12th of May. Our sensitivity is never, never lapses in relation to the ref. We had about five minutes off after we submitted back in 2021 and now we're back on for that again. So, from the point of view of academic priorities, we are compelled to have the ref in the forefront of our vision. Collaboration with the archives is something which really enables us to tap into some of the core objectives in terms of what's been defined as viable impact people in the arts and humanities. And of course we have a number of ambitions in parallel with archives and heritage and museum services. So, in other words, it's not that academics aim to achieve improvements to quality of life to local populations or indeed national global populations and other people don't. This means that we are able to draw on our collaboration with archive services to make a more powerful and persuasive case for things like funding. And so the second major example I want to give you today is the case of the small bills and petty finance project, which secured three quarters of a million pounds worth of funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. So it was a very big deal both for both for Kiel and the funder, I think. And you can find out more about this from our website which I've pictured on the slide and from a number of different sources that I mentioned as we go through. But the thing that I really want to underpin in this slide is the fact that we couldn't possibly have obtained that money without the collaboration with the archives. Because it was the Staffordshire engagement officer who first of all facilitated the pilot project, which enabled us to demonstrate proof of concept, and which then, and who then supported us as the project ran initially it was going to be for three years but then because of COVID it ended up being four. So this is a project which actually became even longer as a result of perhaps even more impactful as a result of COVID. My assumption when I started was that volunteers might be, I had some unformed ideas about what I thought that volunteers might want to get out of a collaboration with academics and with archives. And the Small Bills and Petty Finance project pretty much required volunteer input because it set out a programme of work that it was too was too vast to contemplate without assistance other words without people to help support weekly meet and offer us their time and their expertise. And so it seemed to me that it might be the case. I hoped it was the case that volunteers motivations and aspirations might be met by the ability to bring their own perhaps family research surname research household research to a different programme and speak to a wider project in other words have an input into something which was had significance beyond drawing their own drawing the family tree defining the history of their house or what have you. The it seems to me also quite important that we we meet in locations where volunteers and the community are willing to gather. In other words, universities can be quite off putting places. And ideally libraries and other community locations like county record offices and indeed online, we can buy utilising these sorts of spaces and of course since COVID we're all much more adept at using online spaces but by using these means of meeting people which are not necessarily requiring people to sort of to tackle getting onto campus or to managing university buildings seem to me to be quite important. And it also struck me from the outset and indeed it was proved by events that we would need to adapt our project to fit the cohort of volunteers we recruited and this, for example, was demonstrated when our first pilot project began with one group of volunteers that have been long established to the structure record office and who didn't really weren't all that keen on the small bills offer. And so they were they were exceptionally dedicated given that they weren't they weren't all that persuaded by my initial pitch for their work on these these materials which are essentially the materials of the old pool or but they saw through their their shares it were the work that then declined further engagement, which required us to go back and rethink both in terms of the fit with the volunteers and the offer that we were making in terms of the types of work we were proposing that people could undertake. But on balance, as a result, I'd say we, I think we conclude that the volunteer element of the collaboration was key to bridging the gap between the academic project and the public audience by stimulating new directions in research and presentation. One recent comment on the blog, for example, the blog, one of the blogs hosted by the staff of archives commented directly quote wonderful this research has been made accessible, which in in brief is what we set out to achieve. There are briefly also those some some thoughts about archival ambitions. I think we probably can't claim to speak to all five of the tenets of well being in sense that unless you actually get up out of your chair and then go to the archive or go to the library that that I suppose is a form of being active but most of the time in archives we're sitting down. More indeed in other locations we're sitting down to do this work so, but we do speak to the other four of the five tenets of well being because volunteering enables us and the successful fostering of volunteering collaborations enables us to claim that we are encouraging people to take notice to connect to keep learning and to give because the giving of their expertise. is key to the success of the research project and we can say a bit more about that in questions if you like. And I think that that collaboration of expertise where you have an academic and archivist and a group of volunteers in the room is quite a potent venue for fostering new understandings of life in the past in our case. It also is a way to exert more funding and so it was the initial collaboration with the archives which enabled me to obtain funding. It's also a way for archives to obtain funding so as a result of the wider small bills project. We worked with the Staffordshire the East Sussex and the Cumbria archive service and the results of that has been for the Cumbria archive service that we've obtained another. Studentship a doctoral studentship akin to the one which is being undertaken by Lucy in relation to the case for the ordinary project. I think one key takeaway point for all this would be that we we we think we should if we haven't already we should in the future evaluate evaluate and evaluate because it's only by seeking independent. Feedback in other words by getting a third party to ask our volunteers and indeed our other participants what they think that we can develop real points for understanding what's worked well and what could work better in the future. So in our in our ongoing collaborations we will be seeking ways to make sure that we are we're collecting that vital evidence of volunteer experience throughout our future projects. Thank you. Thank you very much and we're now going to hear our final presentation and which is about the project the European Digital Treasures Management of Centennial Archives in the 21st century. So this project aims to bring together joint European archival heritage, especially in that kind of digital format and to increase visibility outreach and use of those of those versions and formats. The project involves a consortium of seven institutions from seven countries that unites a multi stakeholder team of state archives, the Technological Institute, a cultural incubator, a research institution and a wider international network of cultural heritage institutions. So Charles from the National Archives of Malta will discuss how this project is helping European archives to reach out to a new cohort of users and that's across the generations from the young to the old. And also around gamification communities as well. So I'll hand over to Charles. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jenny. I'm Charles, 53 years old, short black hair wearing a blue shirt and eyeglasses straight through the objectives of the project. This project, the formal name is the European Digital Treasures. In terms of objectives, the project aims to identify and implement new business models for archives. It also tries to diversify when it comes to the users of archives through the identification of new audiences and the development of strategies and activities. The third main objective is to increase visibility of the European archival heritage, history and culture. In terms of the partnership within this project, we are seven partners from seven countries. There are a number of national archives participating. So there's the National Archives of Norway, the National Archives of Hungary, Spain, Portugal and Malta. We have a university, the Monster Technological University of Ireland and also the International Center for Archival Research, ECROS based in Austria. In terms of the budget, this project has a budget from the European Commission of 1.5 million, which is then up by 50% co-funding from the partners. Coming up to the budget of 3 million euros, spread over three years. It kickstarted in 2018. However, due to COVID, it was actually extended up by a year up to the end of the current year. In terms of the work packages of the project, the first work package tries to identify new business models for the working of EU National Archives, not only National Archives, but EU Archives in the 21st century. The second work package is focused on the creation and dissemination of three transmedia exhibitions. The third work package is identifying new target audiences and then the fourth work package, which cuts across the whole project, is the admin of the project. This is the communication administration reporting. Let's focus a bit about each of the work packages. So under the new business models, basically there were a number of studies. One of the studies was definition of international benchmarks for the working of archives. An interesting component of the project was the artist in residence. So basically this was a call within the different countries where the project was taking place. Asking for artists to join the archives participating, spend some time with them, understand the work processes of archives, and also come up with merchandising that can be then promoted through the partners of the project. We mentioned gamification, so basically there were also specific projects and seminars whereby experts in the area of gamification were asked to take documents from archives and interpret them in a particular game. There were workshops about new technologies, new business models, and also about generation of income from new activities. On the screen there is a snapshot of some of the extensive merchandising that came out from the project. What's interesting about this merchandising is that it's not simply merchandising as a profit making activity, it's merchandising that was developed in collaboration with the different archives, starting from documents from the various themes within the project, and then building the product and integrating the whole product within the various activities of the project. The second work package, the second work package consisted in something tangible and the creation of the three interactive transmedia exhibitions that were held in each of the six countries participating in the project. There were long discussions about the themes, what themes to be chosen. Finally, the selection of documentation from the different archives started with about 1000 documents, which was cut down to 140 documents that were finally used for the exhibitions. The themes that were chosen were the construction of Europe from Charlemagne to the EU treaties. The second exhibition focused on exiles, migratory flows and solidarity, and the third and final exhibition European discoveries from the new world to new technologies. This is a visual idea of how these exhibitions looked. This is actually one of the exhibitions. They are similar exhibitions held in the different countries, making a lot of use of augmented reality, virtual reality, not the traditional focus on the document itself, but the focus on how that traditional document can be interpreted in modern ways for new audiences. The third work packages targeted new audiences and basically this was split up into two focus areas, the younger generation, and for the younger generation there was the development of an online archival literacy course, the creation of a virtual European archives, and also the development of edutainment applications linked to the exhibitions. When it comes to the 60 plus age groups, the silver generation, there was first of all a survey conducted among these users of archives about their needs and expectations, and there was also an interesting crowdsourcing activity involving members from this cohort. The survey was carried out in 2020. It reached 889 participants, frequenting the different archives in these six different countries, and a lot of interesting insights came out of the study. Now with all the studies, as we mentioned the earlier studies also, these studies will be available once the project is finalized for all the other archives, not only in these countries to use as a point of reference. In terms of the crowdsourcing activity for the silver generation, this was an interesting collaboration between the University of Polytechnica of Valencia and Spain. This university came up with a creation of a software aimed at the recognition of handwritten texts from manuscripts, and the interesting involvement of volunteers, of these volunteers who are 60 years and older, was in them helping us to check what the software is actually doing to verify the data and to help in this process. As you can see over there, there are some basic statistics that's the number of volunteers we had from Malta from the silver generation cohort. It was quite encouraging from a small country to have 19 volunteers, some of them Maltese who even live abroad in the UK, in France and in Australia, and basically there are some statistics there of the number of documents they managed to check on this transcription tool. The archival literacy course is a course that is online, it's available online for anyone to use, targeted at youths in the age bracket 15 to 18 or even younger. Basically, it's not a course that aims to, in any way, train archivists. It's a very basic course that tries to bridge the gap that we know exists between archives and the mysteries surrounding archives and the people out there. This is actually a slide of a seminar, we held one of the authors of the modules, Marika Kamelleri, who is delivering a presentation presenting this archival literacy course. The European Youth Archive was an initiative targeting youths in these different countries. We would have expected more take up of this initiative, however, we did realize there were challenges, especially with examination phases in different timeframes within different countries. Youths were asked to select three documents from the 140 documents used in exhibitions and they were asked to interpret the document in whatever form, digital form they want. Some of them did play PowerPoint presentations, other created a short film footage and a group of Spanish youths also came up with a song. They actually wrote a song inspired by a medieval document and also wrote the music and recorded that particular song. The end result of this youth collaboration was a summer camp that was held last week in Budapest. Over there there's a photo of the steering committee actually meeting and evaluating the youth proposals and then the group of youths who visited Budapest last week from the different countries and they had a week packed with activities ranging from visits in the different archives to, for example, the building of time capsules linked also to the same project. At the end of the project there are a number of expected outcomes, most of these have already been accomplished because basically we will start now during this summer, the reporting phase of the project to wrap the whole project up by this December. There were a number of initiatives that are listed over there, basically a number of operators from different archives involved and a number also of persons who probably never imagined they will reach to an archive. So over here we have a slide of one of the meetings that we held for the Silver Generation cohort and basically it's a step by step presentation to them about this transcription project that was highly, highly successful. In terms of the outcomes I would like also to highlight that when it comes to the exhibitions, the exhibitions will also leave a permanent mark on the sector because when it comes to the edutainment applications, the number of different games that were generated from the archives. These are all products as is the merchandising that will be licensed to the different archives and will be actually utilized throughout in the years to come, even after the project is over at the end of this year. I would like to thank you and to encourage you to enjoy this project because a lot of it is online through the website of the project that's digitaltreasures.e. Thank you very much. Thank you Charles and if I could invite every all the speakers to maybe switch their cameras on and we can move to the Q&A. Because we already have lots of lovely questions coming in through the Q&A box. I thought I'd start with one for everybody because that would be good so everybody gets a chance to kind of get back into speaking. So the question is from Melinda and it's all about kind of we've seen from the kind of various presentations at these partnerships that you're talking about are bringing mutual benefit. But Melinda's question is kind of how easy is it to sort of get started with that. And you know how easy was it for all these different partners to kind of well to identify the partners to start with to work out who to work with and then to kind of understand each other's goals and to kind of form that partnership. And she asked particularly if you have any tips for kind of creating a good starting point. So how do you kind of identify the partners and kind of build that partnership? I don't know if anybody has any reflections on that. Please speak up. Maybe I could start things off. Yeah, it's a really, really good question. Particularly around the area of how you identify what about the partnership is going to be mutually beneficial. And I think with the Living Knowledge Network we found that it's about understanding where you add value to each other. What can the other partner do that you can't do? What do they bring to the partnership? And with libraries the fantastic thing is that national local connection. We have a national platform. We have a national brand. We have a known brand. We can support with assets. We can bring high quality cultural offers. The libraries then have the connections locally. They have the understanding of how to use those assets. They know how to augment it and create something really resonant for their own communities. They reach into areas and they find, you know, we have a lot of evaluations that we do and we continually assess those relationships. And I think that's also really important to understand and to emphasize that you need to constantly check in with with each other as to how well those partnerships are creating impact. And one thing we found through libraries is that we're actually seek, we sort of through the content is actually reaching people who might not normally engage with culture of that kind. Through branch and community libraries particularly. So with that knowledge we can then try to, you know, expand those partnerships further into those areas to make more impact. So it's just about continuously reviewing it, starting from a place of sort of mutual impact and then continually reviewing that so that it becomes a closer and closer partnership and always continuing that sphere of conversation, always making sure that there's an open space for discussion. So that all the partners feel that their voice has heard and always valued, I would say that's probably the most important thing. Thank you, Kathy. That's wonderful. Does anybody have anything they'd like to add to that? I can just contribute that, sorry, Salana, historians and historians always in archives and archives always talking to historians, but I think what's more difficult to know is where you have things of mutual interest. In other words, archives have diverse holdings and sometimes have something that speak very sort of openly to the interests of an academic in a nearby university, but the academic doesn't necessarily know it and vice versa. So it's not necessarily the case that academics go to archives and say, do you want to, have you got anything like this because I'm interested in this sort of material. So I think it's about dialogue, sort of having venues to open out that dialogue. I was very fortunate in Staffordshire in sense that we've always had a long, a long standing connection between the university and the archives for the purposes of teaching local history to adult students. But it's, I think it's about taking the plunge and making the first approach. Does anybody have any tips for that first approach? How do you go up to somebody who've never met before and make that approach? What's your pitch? I think you stood up by asking them what they're doing and then seeing how it fits in with what you want to do. And I really liked what Catherine said about recognizing what other people can do that you desperately want to do, but you know you can't within your particular situation. And I think that really works with us and the volunteers and Alana in that, well and Keel, in that we can't infuse the volunteers as much about the collections that they're working on as an expert can. And we can't get grant funding without that academic support. So you look at what you can't do and see who can you work with to achieve what you want to achieve. Yes, as Alana said, having conversations. Thank you, Rebecca. And Charles, you were working with some unusual groups like gamers and artists. How did you sort of reach out to them? Yes, in our case, because it's an international project involving partners from different countries. Basically, the starting point was the personal connections we already had. Actually, maybe one could ask why these countries, why Spain and more than Hungary, for example, the main reason is that there were personal connections that were built over the years. Our sector, the archive sector, especially probably more than libraries is a relatively small sector, even internationally. So some of us studied on the same courses, even in the UK. So there are those connections which one should use and one should build upon because obviously to develop that relation between two national archives to go into a venture like this. It's not something you would build in a couple of weeks. It's something that was built over a number of years. Then obviously when the project took shape and when we started working, basically there were a lot of rules that we had to abide with. In some cases, it was simply issuing a call that was set up for all the countries and maybe that was one of the shortcomings of the project that sometimes what worked really fine in Budapest did not really work that well in Spain or in Malta. But again, it was an interesting experience and especially we're getting feedback this week from the youth camp in Budapest when you have these youths coming from different places. Most of them had no idea what archives there are or never visited an archives before. So they came to us through their schools. So we did disseminate the call through schools. They reached us through schools, through history courses, through social studies or similar topics. And they become their new, nowadays they are our new community of collaborators. And at the end of the day, there was not much to lose in our case. Basically, we were trying to reach out. There were some disappointments. Some of the numbers in some countries were not really what we would have expected. But again, the overall experience was quite positive. Thank you. And I have a specific question next. This one is for Alana and Rebecca. And Chris is curious to know whether you also collaborated with the North Norfolk Archives, the Change Minds Project, which has also worked on local asylum records. And if so, if there has been any evaluative work of what worked well there and what worked well in Staffordshire. Yeah, thanks, Jenny. And thanks, Chris, for your question. It's a good question. The North Norfolk Archives Change Minds Project was starting up pretty much at the same time as our project. And when we were thinking about our project, the sort of planning for both projects happened quite closely. But we didn't go any further with joining up with that Change Minds project because it didn't work with our funders and our specific remit for how we used our funding. And I know we didn't work with them, but it's a really good point and I'm glad you've reminded me of it because I really think we should do some evaluation with them. I think that would be really interesting and I will follow that up. Thank you. And there's a question there mentioning evaluation around evaluation because yourself and Rebecca and Alana and also you, Charles, you're kind about that evaluation stage. There's a question about the kind of importance of kind of constantly monitoring the kind of relationship. So I don't know if people had anything to say about kind of their plans for evaluation or how evaluation tells you what has changed. Do you have any examples of ways of evaluating that kind of produce the sort of evidence that is going to kind of demonstrate the impact that you want? There's something briefly here, which is that I was very green in this respect. And so when I first put in an application for funding, I didn't consider that evaluation might have costs attached. But then I came up against the very obvious problem, which is that if you can't go to people and say to them, what do you think of me? So what you need is a strategy and a third party and some funding to repay that third party for them to make investigations as to how people are candidly reacting to what you're doing and your proposals without them feeling like you're sort of watching over them. So we used an evaluation company called Urban Lamp. There are lots of evaluation companies out there, but they were very good at conducting face-to-face interviews and indeed on the onset of COVID telephone interviews with our volunteers to find out what they thought us. So Catherine, go on. I just think this is such an important area. It's something that we should all be always doing more of. And I think one of the things we maybe need to do better is to be connecting that data and that evaluation, you know, the evidence you have of that impact that you've made with our audience development plans for the future so that there's a continuous kind of connection between that evaluation, what you're going to be doing next. Because we often think, oh, we've wrapped that project up, we've evaluated it. But yeah, one thing we're really trying to look at is how can we use that information to improve what we're doing to feed into the next project. When you're working with partnerships, the really challenging thing is getting them all involved in it, because like Helena says, you need a system that takes staff resource, staff time. And I think one of the really important things to do is make sure that that evaluative material is of benefit to your partners as well as you. So you're all kind of reaping rewards from that evaluation and showing that sort of change impact on audiences really well. And I just jump in to say that I think that's why those initial conversations when you're forming partnerships are really important to understand what's going to be valuable to them. So when you're thinking through your project and how you're going to evaluate and the impact you want to make, you're measuring based on those goals that you have. And for us, it's quite tricky because we work with so many different libraries, some of them are run by councils, some of them are run by kind of independent charities that are funded in a completely different way. So trying to balance that alongside our own evaluation that we have to have as the British library is quite complex. But I'd really, it's an area that I think is still being developed in the cultural sector. So anyone with an interest in it, I'd recommend to attend webinars by the centre of cultural value who are doing lots of work on trying to kind of critically look at how we evaluate cultural experiences and take some of the pressure off the audience. Who end up doing a lot of legwork and telling us what they think, and it's not very enjoyable. And we need to kind of make that part of the enjoyment of cultural content and cultural experiences. Thank you. We have another question. This is about this kind of, you've made a point about this kind of national and then regional and this kind of different scales we've also got international here so we've got international we've got national we've got local. So, how is this kind of affected this kind of global to sort of reach is the international national and the connections that you're trying to make at sort of which scale. How has that kind of affected the project design and delivery do you think do you think it's easier if you're just operating at a local scale, or is it harder when you're starting to connect across local regional or regional, you know, national. I think what's really exciting for us has been part of the living knowledge network even though it's a big national project. We really have the freedom to make it hyper local and use our own networks, and even just over the last four or five years. We might have started with one or two museums that we're working with. But now we go to them each time we've got, you know, an exhibition. And it's just given us a focus we know this project's going to come every years exhibition. And it's quite a bit branded British library, but because I know the quality is there, but then we can use our own networks to do something completely different. And I think that's what's really nice is that each library, even if they have the same source material same assets can do something completely different, but I think it does have a very local impact even as a national project. I hope Catherine and Maxine agree. Yeah, that's really great to hear. And I think it's about creating when you're working on this scale I think about creating assets and cultural experiences that can be taken in a multitude of directions, based on the location that they're in so they have to be scalable but they have to be flexible. And I think quite often that is just about simplifying the offer so that the power in the sense is in the hands of those local, you know, curators and local libraries to kind of make it what they want it to be to make it really resonate in the way that makes sense to them. So it's not about us kind of imparting lots of cultural assets on to forcing a sort of certain direction of travel but really leaving that open and really clear so that that can just be taken in a multitude of directions depending on what makes sense to the local area. And I have a question for Charles this is around and this is obviously project work the European digital treasures is a kind of a project that's coming to an end. But what kind of bits of it are you going to be able to kind of embed do you think permanently in archival working practices because I'm thinking that this this idea of merchandising and income generation and particularly the stuff around business models how do you think that's going to embed or you know how are you going to kind of carry that forward to kind of normal archival business as usual I guess. I think there were there were certain initiatives that will remain as studies that depend on whoever wants to consult them and to take them to another step. Basically, when it comes to the merchandising, there is already agreement that each National Archives or each archives involved in the project would have the licensing agreement to use those those products. So basically, in terms of what the project created there is a lot there was already a lot of thinking in the project that there will be permanent benefits from from the outcomes of the project. However, what I would like to highlight most because compared to some of the other projects we've heard about this was quite rigid because when you have European funding. You're quite in a straight jacket what you can do and especially the public procurement within the different countries meant a lot of commitment and time and not necessarily getting the product you want. However, there is the added advantage of the new networks that we've been let's say this network of older persons who are now volunteers with the archives, apart from the project they worked upon which was literally imposed by the project. We still kept them now as volunteers working, most of them at least in other areas of the archive so I would say the main advantage apart from the merchandising the studies and all that. That's probably the advantage on an institutional level, but then the new networks and the new cohorts of collaborators is definitely a big advantage, especially for an institution as small as ours where where you get 19 new volunteers at one go that's quite quite an achievement for a small archive. So that's one of the benefits again we're talking about the benefits of partnership working and actually to some extent the values in those partnerships and the values in the collaboration and the connections that you're making. And I just wondered, Alana or Rebecca, I was, you're sort of doing citizen research to some extent, you know, a lot of talk about citizen science but this is like citizen history. So does that sort of translate well because in terms of kind of aligning goals aligning benefits. You know, can you kind of translate the work of the kind of citizen researchers the volunteer researchers into that academic sphere, you know, do people see as real real academic research or that sort of thing. Well I have a very good piece of information on that which is that when we, one of the things we offer to do with the project was to have a book of the project. And we wanted two things for that firstly that it was open access so that when it was published it would be available to everyone, including volunteers, but also the volunteers will be represented as writers in that book. So we didn't compel anyone but we, we opened up the opportunity for anyone who wanted to in the amongst across our three participating county groups. If anybody wanted to write a small piece, perhaps I was thinking of a biographical piece essentially about one of the people they've researched as a result of the somebody who's embedded in the experience of the old war. We had two volunteers from each county so there are six pieces by volunteers in the book, which comes out in the next month, I think. So, yes, it we've, we've, we've explicitly made it our goal to say that this this research is appearing on the same platform so academic articles but also volunteering biographies. And I think that's the next logical step in the sense that quite a lot of projects have blogs where you have a mixture of academic student and volunteer input. And I think the obvious next step is publication.